Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Alice Meynell (Illustrated) E-Book

Alice Meynell

• Herausgeber: Delphi Publishing Ltd
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: Delphi Poets Series
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 1206

Beschreibung

The English poet and essayist Alice Meynell was twice considered for the Poet Laureate, upon the deaths of both Tennyson and Alfred Austin. She was one of the early founders of the Catholic Women's Suffrage Society, in support of peaceful means for the achievement of equal suffrage rights for women. Meynell’s poetry is marked by its simple vocabulary and religious sincerity, communicating a gentle mournfulness and a sense of the passing of time. The Delphi Poets Series offers readers the works of literature’s finest poets, with superior formatting. This volume presents Meynell’s complete poetical works, with related illustrations and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1)

* Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Meynell’s life and works
* Concise introduction to Meynell’s life and poetry
* Rare posthumous poems available in no other collection
* Images of how the poetry books were first printed, giving your eReader a taste of the original texts
* Excellent formatting of the poems
* Special chronological and alphabetical contents tables for the poetry
* Easily locate the poems you want to read
* Includes Meynell’s essays — spend hours exploring the poet’s prose
* Ordering of texts into chronological order and literary genres

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CONTENTS:

The Life and Poetry of Alice Meynell
Brief Introduction: Alice Meynell by Katherine Brégy
Complete Poetical Works of Alice Meynell
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order

The Prose
The Poor Sisters of Nazareth (1889)
The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays (1893)
The Colour of Life and Other Essays on Things Seen or Heard (1896)
The Children (1897)
The Spirit of Place and Other Essays (1899)
London Impressions (1898)
Ceres’ Runaway and Other Essays (1909)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1911)
Essays (1914)
Hearts of Controversy (1917)

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Leseprobe

Alice Meynell

(1847-1922)

Contents

The Life and Poetry of Alice Meynell

Brief Introduction: Alice Meynell by Katherine Brégy

Complete Poetical Works of Alice Meynell

List of Poems in Alphabetical Order

The Prose

The Poor Sisters of Nazareth (1889)

The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays (1893)

The Colour of Life and Other Essays on Things Seen or Heard (1896)

The Children (1897)

The Spirit of Place and Other Essays (1899)

London Impressions (1898)

Ceres’ Runaway and Other Essays (1909)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1911)

Essays (1914)

Hearts of Controversy (1917)

The Delphi Classics Catalogue

© Delphi Classics 2021

Version 1

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Alice Meynell

By Delphi Classics, 2021

COPYRIGHT

Alice Meynell - Delphi Poets Series

First published in the United Kingdom in 2021 by Delphi Classics.

© Delphi Classics, 2021.

All rights reserved.  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

ISBN: 978 1 80170 032 0

Delphi Classics

is an imprint of

Delphi Publishing Ltd

Hastings, East Sussex

United Kingdom

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NOTE

When reading poetry on an eReader, it is advisable to use a small font size and landscape mode, which will allow the lines of poetry to display correctly.

The Life and Poetry of Alice Meynell

Barnes, London Borough of Richmond upon Thames — Alice Meynell’s birthplace

Brief Introduction: Alice Meynell by Katherine Brégy

From ‘The Poets’ Chantry’ (1912)

THE WORLD WAS FIRST AWARE of Alice Meynell (or as she then was, Alice Thompson) as a poet when the little initial volume, Preludes, blossomed into life like a March violet — early enough, one can never forget, to win Ruskin’s enthusiastic praise. Three of its selections (“San Lorenzo’s Mother,” together with the closing lines of the “Daisy” sonnet and that unforgettable “Letter from a Girl to Her Own Old Age”) he forthright declared “the finest things I have yet seen, or felt, in modern verse.” That was a personal estimate, to be sure, since Tennyson, Browning, Patmore, and Swinburne were all in the act of writing memorable things; but what a thunderously significant tribute to lay at the feet of a young girl just lifting up her voice in song! Abyssus abyssum invocat.

More than a quarter of a century has passed, and in the actual matter of poetry, Mrs. Meynell has published but two additional volumes, the Poems of 1893 (an augmented reprint of the original booklet) and the slight but weighty Later Poems of 1901; these, with fugitive strains of rare beauty in some favoured review, make up the sum. The voice in its moment was ex cathedra; having spoken, she may hold her peace.

She has elected all along to speak in a deliberately vestal and cloistral poetry. Remote as the mountain snows, yet near as the wind upon our face, is her song. It is seldom sensuous, the very imagery being evoked, in the main, from the intellectual vision; and there are moments when “amorous thought has sucked pale Fancy’s breath” quite out of the stanzas. Yet these tremble with a deep and impassioned emotion — emotion which seems aloof because it is so interior. For the characteristic note of Mrs. Meynell’s music is not yearning or aspiration; it is not the dear and consummate fruition of life; still less is it a mourning over things lost. It is the note of active renunciation. Renunciation of the beloved by the lover, that both may be more true to the Heart of Love; renunciation by the poet, the artist, not only of the poor, precious human comforting, but likewise of his own sweet prodigality in art — that he may see a few things clearly, without excess; in fine, the ultimate and inevitable renunciations of the elect soul.

Renunciation of the beloved by the lover; that, surely is not a new note; quite a universal note, life and art would seem to say. It is instinct with the power and passion which are the raison d’être of poetry. Yet it is never a seriously chosen and admitted strain save by the very little flock — and Mrs. Meynell has made it quite her own. One exquisite sonnet, “Renouncement,” has concentrated the message; but the companion poem may be discerned to beat with a still more poignant music. “After a Parting” it is named: —

Farewell has long been said; I have foregone thee;⁠I never name thee even.But how shall I learn virtues and yet shun thee?⁠For thou art so near HeavenThat heavenward meditations pause upon thee.

Thou dost beset the path to every shrine;⁠My trembling thoughts discernThy goodness in the good for which I pine;⁠And, if I turn from but one sin, I turnUnto a smile of thine.

Alice Meynell — From a photograph by Resta

How shall I thrust thee apart⁠Since all my growth tends to thee night and day — To thee faith, hope, and art?⁠Swift are the currents setting all one way;They draw my life, my life, out of my heart.

Another early poem, “To the Beloved,” should be quoted in contrast. Surpassingly tender and delicate is its feeling; but its reticence, its singular peace, are almost a rebuke to more vehement possessors:

Oh, not more subtly silence strays⁠Amongst the winds, between the voices,Mingling alike with pensive lays,⁠And with the music that rejoices,Than thou art present in my days.·⁠·⁠·⁠·⁠·⁠·Thou art like silence all unvexed⁠Though wild words part my soul from thee.Thou art like silence unperplexed,⁠A secret and a mysteryBetween one footfall and the next.·⁠·⁠·⁠·⁠·⁠·Darkness and solitude shine, for me.⁠For life’s fair outward part are rifeThe silver noises; let them be.⁠It is the very soul of lifeListens for thee, listens for thee.

Even for this denial, this abeyance of love, has Alice Meynell reserved her own quintessential vehemence.

All this perennial, repetitional sacrifice of the lower to the higher good was foreshadowed in her earliest verses. It is a solitariness never far from our poet’s song — a wistful loneliness in the youthful stanzas; a pain high-heartedly born, welcomed, treasured above all cheaper gifts in the more mature pages. Much has been said about that unique and heart-shaking “ Letter from a Girl to her Own Old Age.” But there is a less known apostrophe, “The Poet to his Childhood,” about which something remains to be spoken. It probes to the heart of the sacrificial vocation — whether poetic or sacerdotal matters little:

If it prove a life of pain, greater have I judged the gain,With a singing soul for music’s sake I climb and meet the rain,And I choose, whilst I am calm, my thought and labouring to be⁠Unconsoled by sympathy.

Mrs. Meynell has loved the Lady Poverty as truly as ever the Assisian did: but hers is a Lady whose realm is over letters as well as life. She dwells in the twilight and the dawn; her cool, quiet fingers are pressed upon the temples of love; in “slender landscape and austere,” in nature marvellously but not rapturously understood, she is found. And close beside her treads another Lady, “our sister, the Death of the Body” — Death the Revealer, making clear at last the mysteries of weary Life. This is distinctly the motive, very personal and very perfect, not merely of the much-praised sonnet “To a Daisy,” but of Mrs. Meynell’s Nature poetry as a whole.

Through “The Neophyte” and “San Lorenzo Giustiniani’s Mother” the selfsame cry is variously but unmistakably heard. It stings the soul in that late and mystical lyric:

⁠Why wilt thou chide,Who hast attained to be denied?⁠Oh learn, aboveAll price is my refusal, Love.⁠My sacred Nay

Was never cheapened by the way;⁠Thy single sorrow crowns thee lordOf an unpurchasable word.⁠Oh strong! Oh pure!As Yea makes happier loves secure,⁠I vow thee thisUnique rejection of a kiss!·⁠·⁠·⁠·⁠·⁠·

More than one meditation of this final volume suggest the influence of that immemorial (and in these latter days too little known) treasure-house of poetry and vision, the Roman Breviary. But always the distinction and the originality of Alice Meynell’s thought, the peculiar personality of her vision, have about them a very sacredness. Not lightly comes the illumination of the singular soul: that particular judgment so transcendently more appalling than the final and general judgment! She has not feared to travel up the mountain side alone — to look down, with eyes that have known both tears and the drying of tears, upon the ways of human life.

In the matter of artistry and poetic technique, Mrs. Meynell’s work is like fine gold smithery; classic gold smithery, exquisite and austere. “I could wish abstention to exist, and even to he evident in my words,” she has somewhere written; but the words are scrupulously chosen. Her mastery over slight forms — the quatrain, the couplet — is quite as consummate and almost as felicitous as Father Tabb’s. And through this ethereal poetry shine lines of the highest and most serious power.

They who doomed by infallible decreesUnnumbered man to the innumerable grave,

falls upon the ear with Miltonic grandeur. And any poet might rejoice in the fancy which perceives day’s memories flocking home at dusk to the “dove-cote doors of sleep,” or cries out so subtly in the colourless February dawning:

A poet’s face asleep is this grey morn!

Mrs. Meynell’s poetry, like a certain school of modern music, suggests and betrays rather than expresses emotion. It is definite but intangible. It creates an atmosphere of angelically clear thought, of rare delicacies of feeling, and speaks with a perfect reticence. Mistakenly, perhaps, the hasty might dub it a poetry of promise: on the contrary, it is a poetry of uncommonly fine achievement. But it does not achieve the expected thing. We are conscious of a light, a flash, a voice, a perfume — the soul of the Muse has passed by. And we were looking for the body, flower-crowned!

When all is said, it is in her prose that Mrs. Meynell has attained the most compelling and indubitable distinction. In much critical work and some biography, and in a series of essays covering subjects all the way from “impressionist” art to the ways of childhood — or from “Pocket Vocabularies” to the “Hours of Sleep” — her pen has prevailed with a masterful delicacy. These brief pages are seldom distinctly literary in theme, yet they have made literature. Scarcely ever are they professedly religious, yet the whole science of the saints rests by implication within their pages. Alice Meynell is the true contemplative of letters. For contemplation, which in the spiritual world has been described as a looking at and listening to God, is in the world of art a looking at and listening to life. It is an exceedingly quiet and sensitive attention to all that others see but transiently, superficially, in the large. We can scarcely believe many minds capable of the exquisitely subtle and sustained attention, the delicate weighing, the differentiation, and withal the liberal sympathy, which have been the very keynote of her criticism. Take, as an instance, this pregnant passage upon the return and periodicity of our mental processes:

“Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless the recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year. Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind. Disease is metrical, closing in at shorter and shorter periods toward death, sweeping abroad at longer and longer intervals towards recovery. . . Even the burden of a spiritual distress unsolved is bound to leave the heart to a temporary peace; and remorse itself does not remain — it returns. Gaiety takes us by a dear surprise. . . . Love itself has tidal times — lapses and ebbs which are due to the metrical rule of the interior heart, but which the lover vainly and unkindly attributes to some outward alteration in the beloved.”

Coventry Patmore (who in his turn has been the subject of Mrs. Meynell’s illuminative criticism) declared fully one half of the volume just quoted, The Rhythm of Life, to be “classical work, embodying as it does new thought in perfect language, and bearing in every sentence the hallmark of genius.” Only the poets, perhaps, have shared with the saints this singular contemplative attention to things great and small. And in the Nature painting which colours Mrs. Meynell’s pages the same quality is conspicuous. Neither the lyre nor the brush seems strange to the hand which has so sketched for us the majesty of the cloud — not guardian of the sun’s rays merely, but “the sun’s treasurer”; the course of the south-west wind, regnant and imperious; and that “heroic sky,” beneath whose light “few of the things that were ever done upon earth are great enough” to have dared the doing. Not Wordsworth himself has more graciously sung of the daffodil. And who has so understandingly praised the modest yet prevailing grass of the fields, or the trees of July, or given so discerning a study to the gentle “Colour of Life”?

Up and down upon the earth, to and fro upon it, wander the children of men; but few indeed may be trusted to catch the authentic Spirit of Place. Scarcely even our beloved Robert Louis, it would seem, since we have his own record that the act of voyaging was an end in itself — there being

⁠nothing under Heaven so blueThat’s fairly worth the travelling to!

But to the eyes of this woman there is not the same blue in more than a single zenith. “Spirit of place!” she cries in one most characteristic passage, “It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name. . . . The untravelled spirit of place — not to be pursued, for it never flies, but always to be discovered, never absent, without variation — lurks in the byways and rules over the tower, indestructible, an indescribable unity. It awaits us always in its ancient and eager freshness. It is sweet and nimble within its immemorial boundaries, but it never crosses them. . . . Was ever journey too hard or too long, that had to pay such a visit? And if by good fortune it is a child who is the pilgrim, the spirit of place gives him a peculiar welcome. . . . He is well used to words and voices that he does not understand, and this is a condition of his simplicity; and when those unknown words are bells, loud in the night, they are to him as homely and as old as lullabies.”

It is almost a pity, for letters, that so few poets have been mothers; it is the abiding pity of childhood that so few mothers have been poets! Mrs. Meynell has an entire volume dedicated to The Children, and sealed with that gracious understanding of child-life which nothing other than experience can quite authenticate. It is so easy to sentimentalise over children — easy, also, to regard them as necessary nuisances: but to bear with them consistently, in a spirit of love and of discovery, is a beautiful achievement. “Fellow travellers with a bird” (as Alice Meynell felicitously calls the protective adults) may learn strange and hidden things, an they have eyes to see or hearts to understand. Not so impatiently will they frown upon the strange excitement which sparkles from the child’s eyes, as from the kitten’s at dusk — inherited memories of the immemorial hunt, and of the “predatory dark” a thousand years ago. Not so surprising will seem the eternal conflict of bed-time, if they once realise the humorous and pretty fact that the little creature “is pursued and overtaken by sleep, caught, surprised, and overcome. He goes no more to sleep than he takes a ‘constitutional’ with his hoop and hoopstick.” In “The Child of Tumult” Mrs. Meynell has given a most tenderly subtle study; and here is her word upon the forgiveness of children: —

“It is assuredly in the absence of resentment that consists the virtue of childhood. What other thing are we to learn of them? Not simplicity, for they are intricate enough. Not gratitude, for their usual sincere thanklessness makes half the pleasure of doing them good. Not obedience, for the child is born with the love of liberty. And as for humility, the boast of a child is the frankest thing in the world. . . . It is the sweet and entire forgiveness of children, who ask pity for their sorrows from those who have caused them, who do not perceive that they are wronged, who never dream that they are forgiving, and who make no bargain for apologies — it is this that men and women are urged to learn of a child. Graces more confessedly childlike they make shift to teach themselves.”

Many a man, and many a woman, have written more nobly than they have lived: into the art has gone the truest part of the soul. But what unique conviction breathes from work which is at one with life — nay, which is the fruit of deep and costly living! The acuteness, the activity, the profundity of Mrs. Meynell’s thought could not fail to achieve their own place in English letters. But her sympathy and her eternal rightness of vision are qualities in which we rejoice, humbled. These have given to her work that peculiar intuitive truth which is the rarest of beauties. “Her manner,” wrote Mr. George Meredith, “presents to me the image of one accustomed to walk in holy places and keep the eye of a fresh mind on our tangled world.” But no single virtue of all Mrs. Meynell’s work is of the obvious or popular kind. Her pages are packed with thought, and the style — one of exceptional precision and exceptional beauty — is yet given to ellipse, to suggestion rather than emphasis, and to a quite inalienable subtlety. She speaks to the higher, even the highest, faculties of the mind. She has pleaded all along for singularity of soul, for distinction and elevation of personality, for the rejection of many things from our multitudinous modern life.

Sometimes, as in “Decivilised,” it is with the trenchant wit and irony that her sentence has been passed:

“The difficulty of dealing — in the course of any critical duty — with decivilised man lies in this: when you accuse him of vulgarity — sparing him, no doubt, the word — he defends himself against the charge of barbarism. Especially from new soil — transatlantic, colonial — he faces you, bronzed, with a half conviction of savagery, partly persuaded of his own youthfulness of race. He writes — and recites — poems about ranches and canyons; they are designed to betray the recklessness of his nature and to reveal the good that lurks in the lawless ways of a young society. . . . American fancy played long this pattering part of youth. The New Englander hastened to assure you, with so self-denying a face, he did not wear war-paint and feathers, that it became doubly difficult to communicate to him that you had suspected him of nothing wilder than a second-hand dress coat. And when it was a question not of rebuke but of praise, the American was ill-content with the word of the judicious who lauded him for some delicate successes in continuing something of the literature of England, something of the art of France. . . . Even now English voices, with violent commonplace, are constantly calling upon America to begin — to begin, for the world is expectant — whereas, there is no beginning for her, but, instead, a continuity which only a constant care can guide into sustained refinement and can save from decivilisation. . . . Who shall discover why derivation becomes degeneration, and where and when and how the bastardy befalls? The decivilised have every grace as the antecedent of their vulgarities, every distinction as the precedent of their mediocrities. . . . They were born into some tendency to derogation, into an inclination for things mentally inexpensive.”

But oftener the word has been spoken gently, almost casually; that the multitude seeing might not see, and hearing might not understand. Yet this attitude of Mrs. Meynell’s is as far as possible from disdain. For the “narrow house,” the obtuse mind baffled and inarticulate, for the shackled body, the groping soul, she has spoken with largest sympathy. Further than Charles Lamb’s goes her defence of beggars — since she pleads their right not simply to free existence but to a common and fraternal courtesy. All the great and elemental things of life have claimed allegiance from Alice Meynell; her mind, like Raphael’s, “a temple for all lovely things to flock to and inhabit.” Love and the bond of love, the grace and gaiety of life, the woman’s need of a free and educated courage, the delicacies of friendship — one finds their praise upon her reticent lips: these, with unflinching truth to self, and a faith lofty and exquisite. For the pathos of the sentimentalist (ubiquitous and not without a suspicion of the ready-made) our artist has shown slight patience. She will not laugh at her fellow-men; neither will she insist upon weeping over them. There is restraint, “composure” in her dream of life. Yet perchance we open the fortuitous page, and some such lines as these face us:

“It is a curious slight to generous Fate that man should, like a child, ask for one thing many times. Her answer every time is a resembling but new and single gift; until the day when she shall make the one tremendous difference among her gifts — and make it perhaps in secret — by naming one of them the ultimate. What, for novelty? what, for singleness? what, for separateness, can equal the last? Of many thousand kisses the poor last — but even the kisses of your mouth are all numbered.”

It is as old — as sweet and as sad — as the world!

Art to Mrs. Meynell has been a thrice-holy thing; a vocation of priestly dignity, of priestly pain, as her poems witnessed. More than once have her words likened the convent-bell, imperious, not to be foregone, to the poet’s elect fetters. “Within the gate of these laws which seem so small,” she tells us, “lies the world of mystic virtue.” Now here is a viewpoint of the highest and rarest insight. What urbanity, what sweetness, what prevailing harmony it carries into the troublous matter of living. It has attained perspective: and perspective is the end as well as the means of life. Surely it is for this prize alone that we wrestle and run. To treat life in the spirit of art — that, declared another artist-seer, Walter Pater, is not far from the summum bonum: not far from the kingdom of Heaven, one might add, since the ultimate artist is God alone.

Truth, then, has been the first of Mrs. Meynell’s equipments. First truth of seeing (which only the few may ever attain), and then truth of speaking — a rare enough accomplishment. With her work, as with that of Henry James, the fancied obscurity rises mainly from this exceedingly delicate truthfulness; a fastidious requirement of the word — the word — without exaggeration, without superfluity — only with Mr. James this desire has led to repetition; with Mrs. Meynell, to reticence. Having called her contemplative, we now perceive her to be ascetic. The “little less,” both in matter and manner, has seemed to her a counsel of perfection.

Only we, the losers, would quarrel now and again with this perfect abstinence — would drink oftener, if that might be, from a spring of such diamond clearness, of such depth and healing. The fields of modern literature had been more flowery for such nourishment! In all truth, modern thought must needs bear both blossom and fruit because of its shy visits. For Alice Meynell has been very potent in her reserves. She has borne the pennant of the Ideal, with never a dip of the banner, over many a causeway, up many a battle-mented height. She has, by many and by One, been found faithful. Scarcely shall we find a more adequate praise for this English writer than her own praise of the Spanish Velasquez — that she has “kept the chastity of art when other masters were content with its honesty.”

THE END

Meynell, c. 1875

The poet’s husband, Wilfrid Meynell, 1916 — they were married in 1877 and had eight children, including Francis Meynell (1891-1975), who became a poet and a printer that co-founded The Nonesuch Press.

The poet Francis Thompson at the age of 19 — Meynell was an important friend and patron of Thompson.

Women Writer’s Suffrage League postcard from 1910 — Meynell was a vice-president of the Women Writers’ Suffrage League, founded by Cicely Hamilton.

Portrait of Coventry Patmore, by John Singer Sargent, 1894 — Meynell had a deep friendship with Patmore, lasting several years, which led to his becoming obsessed with her, forcing her to break with him.

Meynell by John Singer Sargent, 1894

Meynell in later years

Complete Poetical Works of Alice Meynell

CONTENTS

Early Poems

IN EARLY SPRING

TO THE BELOVED

AN UNMARKED FESTIVAL

IN AUTUMN

PARTED

SOEUR MONIQUE

REGRETS

THE VISITING SEA

AFTER A PARTING

BUILDERS OF RUINS

Sonnets and Other Poems

THOUGHTS IN SEPARATION

THE GARDEN

YOUR OWN FAIR YOUTH

THE YOUNG NEOPHYTE; OR, A YOUNG CONVERT.

SPRING ON THE ALBAN HILLS

IN FEBRUARY

A SHATTERED LUTE

RENOUNCEMENT

TO A DAISY

SAN LORENZO’S MOTHER

THE LOVER URGES THE BETTER THRIFT

CRADLE-SONG AT TWILIGHT

SONG OF THE NIGHT AT DAYBREAK

A LETTER FROM A GIRL TO HER OWN OLD AGE

ADVENT MEDITATION

A POET’S FANCIES

THE LOVE OF NARCISSUS

TO ANY POET

TO ONE POEM IN A SILENT TIME

THE MOON TO THE SUN

THE SPRING TO THE SUMMER

THE DAY TO THE NIGHT

A POET OF ONE MOOD

A SONG OF DERIVATIONS

SINGERS TO COME

UNLINKED

Later Poems

THE SHEPHERDESS

THE TWO POETS

THE LADY POVERTY

NOVEMBER BLUE

A DEAD HARVEST

THE WATERSHED

THE JOYOUS WANDERER

THE RAINY SUMMER

THE ROARING FROST

WEST WIND IN WINTER

THE FOLD

WHY WILT THOU CHIDE?

VENERATION OF IMAGES

I AM THE WAY

VIA, ET VERITAS, ET VITA

PARENTAGE

THE MODERN MOTHER

UNTO US A SON IS GIVEN

VENI CREATOR

TWO BOYHOODS

TO SYLVIA

SAINT CATHERINE OF SIENA

CHIMES

A POET’S WIFE

MESSINA, 1908

THE UNKNOWN GOD

A GENERAL COMMUNION

THE FUGITIVE

IN PORTUGAL, 1912

THE CRUCIFIXION

THE NEWER VAINGLORY

IN MANCHESTER SQUARE

MATERNITY

THE FIRST SNOW

THE COURTS

THE LAUNCH

TO THE BODY

THE UNEXPECTED PERIL

CHRIST IN THE UNIVERSE

BEYOND KNOWLEDGE

EASTER NIGHT

A FATHER OF WOMEN

LENGTH OF DAYS

NURSE EDITH CAVELL

SUMMER IN ENGLAND, 1914

TO TINTORETTO IN VENICE

A THRUSH BEFORE DAWN

THE TWO SHAKESPEARE TERCENTENARIES OF BIRTH, 1864; OF DEATH, 1916

TO O —— , OF HER DARK EYES

THE TREASURE

A WIND OF CLEAR WEATHER IN ENGLAND

IN SLEEP

THE DIVINE PRIVILEGE

FREE WILL

THE TWO QUESTIONS

THE LORD’S PRAYER

Last Poems

THE POET AND HIS BOOK

INTIMATIONS OF MORTALITY

THE WIND IS BLIND

TIME’S REVERSALS

THE THRESHING MACHINE

WINTER TREES ON THE HORIZON

TO SLEEP

THE MARRIAGE OF TRUE MINDS

IN HONOUR OF AMERICA, 1917

LORD, I OWE THEE A DEATH — Richard Hooker

REFLECTIONS

TO CONSCRIPTS

THE VOICE OF A BIRD

THE QUESTION

THE LAWS OF VERSE

THE RETURN TO NATURE

TO SILENCE

THE ENGLISH METRES

RIVERS UNKNOWN TO SONG — James Thomson

TO THE MOTHER OF CHRIST THE SON OF MAN

A COMPARISON IN A SEASIDE FIELD

SURMISE

TO ANTIQUITY

CHRISTMAS NIGHT

THE OCTOBER REDBREAST

TO “A CERTAIN RICH MAN”

EVERLASTING FAREWELLS

THE POET TO THE BIRDS

AT NIGHT

Early Poems Excluded by Meynell from The Collected Poems (1913)

TO THE BELOVED DEAD — A LAMENT

PYGMALION

A TRYST THAT FAILED

THE POETS

TO A LOST MELODY

SONNET. AT A POET’S GRAVE

SONNET. THE POET TO NATURE

THE POET TO HIS CHILDHOOD

A STUDY: IN THREE MONOLOGUES, WITH INTERRUPTIONS

TO TWO TRAVELLERS

A DAY AND A LIFE

THE GIRL ON THE LAND

AENIGMA CHRISTI

Early Poems that First Appeared in the Oxford Edition (1940)

SONG OF THE SOUL OF THE ORGAN

WIND-SONG TO THE HILL

TO A READER WHO SHOULD LOVE ME

A CENOTAPH

ON KEATS’S GRAVE

POEMS FIRST COLLECTED IN 1946

THE SUNDERLAND CHILDREN

MISFORTUNE

Early Poems

INEARLYSPRING

O Spring, I know thee! Seek for sweet surprise            In the young children’s eyes.But I have learnt the years, and know the yet            Leaf-folded violet.Mine ear, awake to silence, can foretell            The cuckoo’s fitful bell.I wander in a grey time that encloses            June and the wild hedge-roses.A year’s procession of the flowers doth pass            My feet, along the grass.And all you wild birds silent yet, I know            The notes that stir you so,Your songs yet half devised in the dim dear            Beginnings of the year.In these young days you meditate your part;            I have it all by heart.

I know the secrets of the seeds of flowers            Hidden and warm with showers,And how, in kindling Spring, the cuckoo shall            Alter his interval.But not a flower or song I ponder is            My own, but memory’s.I shall be silent in those days desired            Before world inspired.O all brown birds, compose your old song-phrases,            Earth, thy familiar daisies!

A poet mused upon the dusky height,            Between two stars towards night,His purpose in his heart. I watched, a space,            The meaning of his face:There was the secret, fled from earth and skies,            Hid in his grey young eyes.My heart and all the Summer wait his choice,            And wonder for his voice.Who shall foretell his songs, and who aspire            But to divine his lyre?Sweet earth, we know thy dimmest mysteries,            But he is lord of his.

TOTHEBELOVED

Oh, not more subtly silence strays    Amongst the winds, between the voices,Mingling alike with pensive lays,    And with the music that rejoices,Than thou art present in my days.

My silence, life returns to thee    In all the pauses of her breath.Hush back to rest the melody    That out of thee awakeneth;And thou, wake ever, wake for me!

Thou art like silence all unvexed,    Though wild words part my soul from thee.Thou art like silence unperplexed,    A secret and a mysteryBetween one footfall and the next.

Most dear pause in a mellow lay!    Thou art inwoven with every air.With thee the wildest tempests play,    And snatches of thee everywhereMake little heavens throughout a day.

Darkness and solitude shine, for me.    For life’s fair outward part are rifeThe silver noises; let them be.    It is the very soul of lifeListens for thee, listens for thee.

O pause between the sobs of cares;    O thought within all thought that is;Trance between laughters unawares:    Thou art the shape of melodies,And thou the ecstasy of prayers!

ANUNMARKEDFESTIVAL

There’s a feast undated, yet    Both our true lives hold it fast, — Even the day when first we met.    What a great day came and passed,  — Unknown then, but known at last.

And we met: You knew not me,    Mistress of your joys and fears;Held my hand that held the key    Of the treasure of your years,    Of the fountain of your tears.

For you knew not it was I,    And I knew not it was you.We have learnt, as days went by.    But a flower struck root and grew    Underground, and no one knew.

Day of days! Unmarked it rose,    In whose hours we were to meet;And forgotten passed. Who knows,    Was earth cold or sunny, Sweet,    At the coming of your feet?

One mere day, we thought; the measure    Of such days the year fulfils.Now, how dearly would we treasure    Something from its fields, its rills,    And its memorable hills.

INAUTUMN

The leaves are many under my feet,    And drift one way.Their scent of death is weary and sweet.    A flight of them is in the greyWhere sky and forest meet.

The low winds moan for dead sweet years;    The birds sing all for pain,Of a common thing, to weary ears, —     Only a summer’s fate of rain,And a woman’s fate of tears.

I walk to love and life alone    Over these mournful places,Across the summer overthrown,    The dead joys of these silent faces,To claim my own.

I know his heart has beat to bright    Sweet loves gone by;I know the leaves that die to-night    Once budded to the sky;And I shall die from his delight.

O leaves, so quietly ending now,    You heard the cuckoos sing.And I will grow upon my bough    If only for a Spring,And fall when the rain is on my brow.

O tell me, tell me ere you die,    Is it worth the pain?You bloomed so fair, you waved so high;    Now that the sad days wane,Are you repenting where you lie?

I lie amongst you, and I kiss    Your fragrance mouldering.O dead delights, is it such bliss,    That tuneful Spring?Is love so sweet, that comes to this?

Kiss me again as I kiss you;    Kiss me again,For all your tuneful nights of dew,    In this your time of rain,For all your kisses when Spring was new.

You will not, broken hearts; let be.    I pass across your deathTo a golden summer you shall not see,    And in your dying breathThere is no benison for me.

There is an autumn yet to wane,    There are leaves yet to fall,Which, when I kiss, may kiss again,    And, pitied, pity me all for all,And love me in mist and rain.

PARTED

Farewell to one now silenced quite,Sent out of hearing, out of sight, —     My friend of friends, whom I shall miss.    He is not banished, though, for this, — Nor he, nor sadness, nor delight.

Though I shall talk with him no more,A low voice sounds upon the shore.    He must not watch my resting-place,    But who shall drive a mournful faceFrom the sad winds about my door?

I shall not hear his voice complain,But who shall stop the patient rain?    His tears must not disturb my heart,    But who shall change the years, and partThe world from every thought of pain?

Although my life is left so dim,The morning crowns the mountain-rim;    Joy is not gone from summer skies,    Nor innocence from children’s eyes,And all these things are part of him.

He is not banished, for the showersYet wake this green warm earth of ours.    How can the summer but be sweet?    I shall not have him at my feet,And yet my feet are on the flowers.

SOEURMONIQUE

A Rondeau by Couperin

Quiet form of silent nun,What has given you to my inward eyes?What has marked you, unknown one,In the throngs of centuriesThat mine ears do listen through?This old master’s melodyThat expresses you;This admired simplicity,Tender, with a serious wit;And two words, the name of it,        “Soeur Monique.”

And if sad the music is,It is sad with mysteriesOf a small immortal thingThat the passing ages sing, — Simple music making mirthOf the dying and the birthOf the people of the earth.

No, not sad; we are beguiled,Sad with living as we are;Ours the sorrow, outpouringSad self on a selfless thing,As our eyes and hearts are mildWith our sympathy for Spring,With a pity sweet and wild

For the innocent and far,With our sadness in a star,Or our sadness in a child.But two words, and this sweet air.            Soeur Monique,Had he more, who set you there?Was his music-dream of youOf some perfect nun he knew,Or of some ideal, as true?

And I see you where you standWith your life held in your handAs a rosary of days.And your thoughts in calm arrays,And your innocent prayers are toldOn your rosary of days.And the young days and the oldWith their quiet prayers did meetWhen the chaplet was complete.

Did it vex you, the surmiseOf this wind of words, this storm of cries,    Though you kept the silence so    In the storms of long ago,    And you keep it, like a star?  — Of the evils triumphing,Strong, for all your perfect conquering,    Silenced conqueror that you are?

And I wonder at your peace, I wonder.Would it trouble you to know,Tender soul, the world and sinBy your calm feet trodden under    Long ago,Living now, mighty to win?And your feet are vanished like the snow.

Vanished; but the poet, heIn whose dream your face appears,He who ranges unknown yearsWith your music in his heart,Speaks to you familiarlyWhere you keep apart,And invents you as you were.And your picture, O my nun!Is a strangely easy one,For the holy weed you wear,For your hidden eyes and hidden hair,And in picturing you I mayScarcely go astray.

O the vague reality,The mysterious certainty!O strange truth of these my guessesIn the wide thought-wildernesses! — Truth of one divined of many flowers;Of one raindrop in the showersOf the long ago swift rain;Of one tear of many tearsIn some world-renowned pain;Of one daisy ‘mid the centuries of sun;Of a little living nunIn the garden of the years.

Yes, I am not far astray;But I guess you as might onePausing when young March is grey,In a violet-peopled day;All his thoughts go out to places that he knew,To his child-home in the sun,To the fields of his regret,To one place i’ the innocent March air,By one olive, and inventThe familiar form and scentSafely; a white violetCertainly is there.

Soeur Monique, remember me.’Tis not in the past aloneI am picturing you to be;But my little friend, my own,In my moment, pray for me.For another dream is mine,And another dream is true,            Sweeter even,Of the little ones that shineLost within the light divine, — Of some meekest flower, or you,            In the fields of heaven.

REGRETS

As, when the seaward ebbing tide doth pour    Out by the low sand spaces,The parting waves slip back to clasp the shore    With lingering embraces, —

So in the tide of life that carries me    From where thy true heart dwells,Waves of my thoughts and memories turn to thee    With lessening farewells;

Waving of hands; dreams, when the day forgets;    A care half lost in cares;The saddest of my verses; dim regrets;    Thy name among my prayers.

I would the day might come, so waited for,    So patiently besought,When I, returning, should fill up once more    Thy desolated thought;

And fill thy loneliness that lies apart    In still, persistent pain.Shall I content thee, O thou broken heart,    As the tide comes again,

And brims the little sea-shore lakes, and sets    Seaweeds afloat, and fillsThe silent pools, rivers and rivulets    Among the inland hills?

THEVISITINGSEA

As the inhastening tide doth roll,Home from the deep, along the whole    Wide shining strand, and floods the caves,  — Your love comes filling with happy wavesThe open sea-shore of my soul.

But inland from the seaward spaces,None knows, not even you, the places    Brimmed, at your coming, out of sight,  — The little solitudes of delightThis tide constrains in dim embraces.

You see the happy shore, wave-rimmed,But know not of the quiet dimmed    Rivers your coming floods and fills,    The little pools ‘mid happier hills,My silent rivulets, over-brimmed.

What! I have secrets from you? Yes.But, visiting Sea, your love doth press    And reach in further than you know,    And fills all these; and, when you go,There’s loneliness in loneliness.

AFTERAPARTING

Farewell has long been said; I have foregone thee;    I never name thee even.But how shall I learn virtues and yet shun thee?    For thou art so near HeavenThat Heavenward meditations pause upon thee.

Thou dost beset the path to every shrine;    My trembling thoughts discernThy goodness in the good for which I pine;    And, if I turn from but one sin, I turnUnto a smile of thine.

How shall I thrust thee apart    Since all my growth tends to thee night and day — To thee faith, hope, and art?    Swift are the currents setting all one way;They draw my life, my life, out of my heart.

BUILDERSOFRUINS

We build with strength the deep tower wall    That shall be shattered thus and thus.And fair and great are court and hall,    But how fair — this is not for us,Who know the lack that lurks in all.

We know, we know how all too bright    The hues are that our painting wears,And how the marble gleams too white; —     We speak in unknown tongues, the yearsInterpret everything aright,

And crown with weeds our pride of towers,    And warm our marble through with sun,And break our pavements through with flowers,    With an Amen when all is done,Knowing these perfect things of ours.

O days, we ponder, left alone,    Like children in their lonely hour,And in our secrets keep your own,    As seeds the colour of the flower.To-day they are not all unknown,

The stars that ‘twixt the rise and fall,    Like relic-seers, shall one by oneStand musing o’er our empty hall;    And setting moons shall brood uponThe frescoes of our inward wall.

And when some midsummer shall be,    Hither will come some little one(Dusty with bloom of flowers is he),    Sit on a ruin i’ the late long sun,And think, one foot upon his knee.

And where they wrought, these lives of ours,    So many-worded, many-souled,A North-west wind will take the towers,    And dark with colour, sunny and cold,Will range alone among the flowers.

And here or there, at our desire,    The little clamorous owl shall sitThrough her still time; and we aspire    To make a law (and know not it)Unto the life of a wild briar.

Our purpose is distinct and dear,    Though from our open eyes ’tis hidden.Thou, Time to come, shalt make it clear,Undoing our work; we are children chidden    With pity and smiles of many a year.

Who shall allot the praise, and guess    What part is yours and what is ours? — O years that certainly will bless    Our flowers with fruits, our seeds with flowers,With ruin all our perfectness.

Be patient, Time, of our delays,    Too happy hopes, and wasted fears,Our faithful ways, our Wilful ways;    Solace our labours, O our seersThe seasons, and our bards the days;

And make our pause and silence brim    With the shrill children’s play, and sweetsOf those pathetic flowers and dim,    Of those eternal flowers my KeatsDying felt growing over him!

Sonnets and Other Poems

THOUGHTSINSEPARATION

We never meet; yet we meet day by day    Upon those hills of life, dim and immense —     The good we love, and sleep, our innocence.O hills of life, high hills! And, higher than they,

Our guardian spirits meet at prayer and play.    Beyond pain, joy, and hope, and long suspense,    Above the summits of our souls, far hence,An angel meets an angel on the way.

Beyond all good I ever believed of thee,    Or thou of me, these always love and live.And though I fail of thy ideal of me,

My angel falls not short. They greet each other.    Who knows, they may exchange the kiss we give,Thou to thy crucifix, I to my mother.

THEGARDEN

My heart shall be thy garden. Come, my own,    Into thy garden; thine be happy hours    Among my fairest thoughts, my tallest flowers,From root to crowning petal thine alone.

Thine is the place from where the seeds are sown    Up to the sky enclosed, with all its showers.    But ah, the birds, the birds! Who shall build bowersTo keep these thine? O friend, the birds have flown.

For as these come and go, and quit our pine    To follow the sweet season, or, new-comers,        Sing one song only from our alder-trees,

My heart has thoughts, which, though thine eyes hold mine,    Flit to the silent world and other summers,        With wings that dip beyond the silver seas.

YOUROWNFAIRYOUTH

Your own fair youth, you care so little for it —     Smiling towards Heaven, you would not stay the advances    Of time and change upon your happiest fancies.I keep your golden hour, and will restore it.

If ever, in time to come, you would explore it —     Your old self, whose thoughts went like last year’s pansies,    Look unto me; no mirror keeps its glances;In my unfailing praises now I store it.

To guard all joys of yours from Time’s estranging,    I shall be then a treasury where your gay,        Happy, and pensive past unaltered is.

I shall be then a garden charmed from changing,    In which your June has never passed away.        Walk there awhile among my memories.

THEYOUNGNEOPHYTE; OR, AYOUNGCONVERT.

Who knows what days I answer for to-day?    Giving the bud I give the flower. I bow    This yet unfaded and a faded brow;Bending these knees and feeble knees, I pray.

Thoughts yet unripe in me I bend one way,    Give one repose to pain I know not now,    One check to joy that comes, I guess not how.I dedicate my fields when Spring is grey.

O rash! (I smile) to pledge my hidden wheat.    I fold to-day at altars far apartHands trembling with what toils? In their retreat

   I seal my love to-be, my folded art.I light the tapers at my head and feet,    And lay the crucifix on this silent heart.

SPRINGONTHEALBANHILLS

O’er the Campagna it is dim, warm weather;    The Spring comes with a full heart silently,    And many thoughts; a faint flash of the seaDivides two mists; straight falls the falling feather.

With wild Spring meanings hill and plain together    Grow pale, or just flush with a dust of flowers.    Rome in the ages, dimmed with all her towers,Floats in the midst, a little cloud at tether.

I fain would put my hands about thy face,    Thou with thy thoughts, who art another Spring,        And draw thee to me like a mournful child.

Thou lookest on me from another place;    I touch not this day’s secret, nor the thing        That in the silence makes thy soft eyes wild.

INFEBRUARY

Rich meanings of the prophet-Spring adorn,    Unseen, this colourless sky of folded showers,    And folded winds; no blossom in the bowers;A poet’s face asleep in this grey morn.

Now in the midst of the old world forlorn    A mystic child is set in these still hours.    I keep this time, even before the flowers,Sacred to all the young and the unborn:

To all the miles and miles of unsprung wheat,    And to the Spring waiting beyond the portal,        And to the future of my own young art,

And, among all these things, to you, my sweet,    My friend, to your calm face and the immortal        Child tarrying all your life-time in your heart.

ASHATTEREDLUTE

I touched the heart that loved me as a player    Touches a lyre. Content with my poor skill,    No touch save mine knew my beloved (and stillI thought at times: Is there no sweet lost air

Old loves could wake in him, I cannot share?)    O he alone, alone could so fulfil    My thoughts in sound to the measure of my will.He is gone, and silence takes me unaware.

The songs I knew not he resumes, set freeFrom my constraining love, alas for me!    His part in our tune goes with him; my part

Is locked in me for ever; I stand as mute    As one with vigorous music in his heartWhose fingers stray upon a shattered lute.

RENOUNCEMENT

I must not think of thee; and, tired yet strong,    I shun the thought that lurks in all delight —     The thought of thee — and in the blue Heaven’s height,And in the sweetest passage of a song.

O just beyond the fairest thoughts that throng    This breast, the thought of thee waits, hidden yet bright;    But it must never, never come in sight;I must stop short of thee the whole day long.

But when sleep comes to close each difficult day,    When night gives pause to the long watch I keep,        And all my bonds I needs must loose apart,

Must doff my will as raiment laid away, —     With the first dream that comes with the first sleep        I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart.

TOADAISY

Slight as thou art, thou art enough to hide    Like all created things, secrets from me,And stand a barrier to eternity.And I, how can I praise thee well and wide

From where I dwell — upon the hither side?    Thou little veil for so great mystery,    When shall I penetrate all things and thee,And then look back? For this I must abide,

Till thou shalt grow and fold and be unfurledLiterally between me and the world.    Then I shall drink from in beneath a spring,

And from a poet’s side shall read his book.    O daisy mine, what will it be to look        From God’s side even of such a simple thing?

SANLORENZO’SMOTHER

I had not seen my son’s dear face(He chose the cloister by God’s grace)    Since it had come to full flower-time.    I hardly guessed at its perfect prime,That folded flower of his dear face.

Mine eyes were veiled by mists of tearsWhen on a day in many years    One of his Order came. I thrilled,    Facing, I thought, that face fulfilled.I doubted, for my mists of tears.

His blessing be with me for ever!My hope and doubt were hard to sever.  — That altered face, those holy weeds.    I filled his wallet and kissed his beads,And lost his echoing feet for ever.

If to my son my alms were givenI know not, and I wait for Heaven.    He did not plead for child of mine,    But for another Child divine,And unto Him it was surely given.

There is One alone who cannot change;Dreams are we, shadows, visions strange;    And all I give is given to One.    I might mistake my dearest son,But never the Son who cannot change.

THELOVERURGESTHEBETTERTHRIFT

My Fair, no beauty of thine will last    Save in my love’s eternity.    Thy smiles, that light thee fitfully,Are lost for ever — their moment past —     Except the few thou givest to me.

Thy sweet words vanish day by day,    As all breath of mortality;    Thy laughter, done, must cease to be,And all thy dear tones pass away,    Except the few that sing to me.

Hide then within my heart, O hide    All thou art loth should go from thee.    Be kinder to thyself and me.My cupful from this river’s tide    Shall never reach the long sad sea.

CRADLE-SONGATTWILIGHT

The child not yet is lulled to rest.    Too young a nurse, the slender NightSo laxly hold him to her breast    That throbs with flight.

He plays with her, and will not sleep.    For other playfellows she sighs;An unmaternal fondness keep    Her alien eyes.

SONGOFTHENIGHTATDAYBREAK

All my stars forsake me.And the dawn-winds shake me,Where shall I betake me?

Whither shall I runTill the set of sun,Till the day be done?

To the mountain-mine,To the boughs o’ the pine,To the blind man’s eyne,

To a brow that isBowed upon the knees,Sick with memories?

ALETTERFROMAGIRLTOHEROWNOLDAGE

Listen, and when thy hand this paper presses,O time-worn woman, think of her who blessesWhat thy thin fingers touch, with her caresses.

O mother, for the weight of years that break thee!O daughter, for slow time must yet awake thee.And from the changes of my heart must make thee!

O fainting traveller, morn is grey in heaven.Dost thou remember how the clouds were driven?And are they calm about the fall of even?

Pause near the ending of thy long migration,For this one sudden hour of desolationAppeals to one hour of thy meditation.

Suffer, O silent one, that I remind theeOf the great hills that stormed the sky behind thee,Of the wild winds of power that have resigned thee.

Know that the mournful plain where thou must wanderIs but a grey and silent world, but ponderThe misty mountains of the morning yonder.

Listen: — the mountain winds with rain were fretting,And sudden gleams the mountain-tops besetting.I cannot let thee fade to death, forgetting.

What part of this wild heart of mine I know notWill follow with thee where the great winds blow not,And where the young flowers of the mountain grow not.

Yet let my letter with thy lost thoughts in itTell what the way was when thou didst begin it,And win with thee the goal when thou shalt win it.

Oh, in some hour of thine thy thoughts shall guide thee.Suddenly, though time, darkness, silence, hide thee,This wind from thy lost country flits beside thee, —

Telling thee: all thy memories moved the maiden,With thy regrets was morning over-shaden,With sorrow, thou hast left, her life was laden.

But whither shall my thoughts turn to pursue thee?Life changes, and the years and days renew thee.Oh, Nature brings my straying heart unto thee.

Her winds will join us, with their constant kissesUpon the evening as the morning tresses,Her summers breathe the same unchanging blisses.

And we, so altered in our shifting phases,Track one another ‘mid the many mazesBy the eternal child-breath of the daisies.

I have not writ this letter of diviningTo make a glory of thy silent pining,A triumph of thy mute and strange declining.

Only one youth, and the bright life was shrouded.Only one morning, and the day was clouded.And one old age with all regrets is crowded.

O hush, O hush! Thy tears my words are steeping.O hush, hush, hush! So full, the fount of weeping?Poor eyes, so quickly moved, so near to sleeping?

Pardon the girl; such strange desires beset her.Poor woman, lay aside the mournful letterThat breaks thy heart; the one who wrote, forget her:

The one who now thy faded features guesses,With filial fingers thy grey hair caresses,With morning tears thy mournful twilight blesses.

ADVENTMEDITATION

Rorate coeli desuper, et nubes pluant JustumAperiatur terra, et germinet Salvatorem.

No sudden thing of glory and fearWas the Lord’s coming; but the dear    Slow Nature’s days followed each other    To form the Saviour from his Mother — One of the children of the year.

The earth, the rain, received the trust, — The sun and dews, to frame the Just.    He drew His daily life from these,    According to His own decreesWho makes man from the fertile dust.

Sweet summer and the winter wild,These brought him forth, the Undefiled.    The happy Springs renewed again    His daily bread, the growing grain,The food and raiment of the Child.

APOET’SFANCIES

THELOVEOFNARCISSUS

Like him who met his own eyes in the river,The poet trembles at his own long gazeThat meets him through the changing nights and daysFrom out great Nature; all her waters quiverWith his fair image facing him for ever;    The music that he listens to betrays    His own heart to his ears; by trackless waysHis wild thoughts tend to him in long endeavour.

His dreams are far among the silent hills;    His vague voice calls him from the darkened plainWith winds at night; strange recognition thrills    His lonely heart with piercing love and pain;He knows again his mirth in mountain rills,    His weary tears that touch him with the rain.

TOANYPOET

Thou who singest through the earth        All the earth’s wild creatures fly thee;Everywhere thou marrest mirth, —         Dumbly they defy thee;    There is something they deny thee.

Pines thy fallen nature everFor the unfallen Nature sweet.But she shuns thy long endeavour,    Though her flowers and wheatThrong and press thy pausing feet.

Though thou tame a bird to love thee,Press thy face to grass and flowers,All these things reserve above thee,    Secrets in the bowers,Secrets in the sun and showers.

Sing thy sorrow, sing thy gladness,In thy songs must wind and treeBear the fictions of thy sadness,    Thy humanity.For their truth is not for thee.

Wait, and many a secret nest,Many a hoarded winter-storeWill be hidden on thy breast.    Things thou longest forWill not fear or shun thee more.

Thou shalt intimately lieIn the roots of flowers that thrustUpwards from thee to the sky,    With no more distrustWhen they blossom from thy dust.

Silent labours of the rainShall be near thee, reconciled;Little lives of leaves and grain,    All things shy and wild,Tell thee secrets, quiet child.

Earth, set free from thy fair fanciesAnd the art thou shalt resign,Will bring forth her rue and pansies    Unto more divineThoughts than any thoughts of thine.

Nought will fear thee, humbled creature.There will lie thy mortal burdenPressed unto the heart of Nature,    Songless in a garden,With a long embrace of pardon.

Then the truth all creatures tell,And His will Whom thou entreatest,Shall absorb thee; there shall dwell    Silence, the completestOf thy poems, last and sweetest.

TOONEPOEMINASILENTTIME

Who looked for thee, thou little song of mine?    This winter of a silent poet’s heart